Recently, Vice-President Al Gore and Senator Bill Bradley squared off in a debate at the Apollo Theater in Harlem. The slashing remarks and bombastic exclamations interspersed with hoots and applause from the enthusiastic audience stripped away any facade of dignity and made clear the shear sport, the joie de guerre, of a political campaign. There was no pretense of a debate devoted to the solemn pursuit of truth. It was just two political adversaries pounding each other with rhetorical punches.
In between disputing who was more in favor of affirmative action or who was more passionately against racial profiling, both candidates and the crowd missed the conspicuous irony imbued in the two issues.
Affirmative action began as an effort to "cast a wider net" in the search of qualified candidates for jobs or college admission. It has inexorably and predictably degraded to preferential treatment based on, among other things, race. Race has become a proxy for disadvantage and entitlement in a racial spoils system.
For an even longer period of time, law enforcement officers have used correlations between dress, manner, and, yes, race, with criminal behavior to decide which citizens to scrutinize further. Racial profiling can become an excuse for lazy law enforcement and the unfair singling out of African-Americans.
Advocates of preferential treatment seek to minimize the pernicious nature of using racial selection criteria by asserting that race is just one of many criteria. Race is not determinative. In truth, if race were merely a marginal criterion employed to decide a few cases at the margins, neither the proponents of, nor opponents of, racial preferences would be so passionate about such programs.
Defenders of racial profiling similarly assert that statistical correlations with criminal behavior are real and that it would be irrational to ignore such information. After all, race is just one of many factors used to assess suspicious individuals. In truth, if race were merely a marginal criterion used sparingly, African-Americans would not feel so singled out, nor would law enforcement officials continue to employ it, even surreptitiously.
Of course, the key fallacy is that race can be used benignly as a proxy for other characteristics without further exacerbating racial stereotypes. Using race to judge people, whether for preferential treatment or assessing whether certain people are suspicious, has the unintended consequence of habituating ourselves to seeing race before the person.
It is possible to argue that racial preferences in college admissions or employment are used to compensate for a disadvantaged background. If this is the case, then use disadvantage not race. It is possible to weigh two candidates with the same test scores or experience and see that one candidate came from an economically disadvantaged background. Given the obstacles that person overcame, he or she might be considered as having accomplished the same with less and be judged the better candidate. This approach might, on average, benefit black candidates, but it would also avoid awarding an unjust advantage to the child of two black professionals over the fatherless white child from Appalachia. Such efforts would force us to look at the individual and the individual's background, not the individual's skin color. It would also avoid the ugly calculus of having to figure out what particular pedigrees are required to be considered black, white or whatever.
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